TerraLine · posted by vaibhav bhawsar 137 days ago
TerraLine
The TerraLine instrument re-appropriates the magnetic compass to show directions that are not cardinal but indicators of economic states. It is an instrument that helps one navigate Earth using such directions.Navigating or orienting ourselves in such ways could offer opportunities of envisioning and exploring our world from different perspectives.
More information in slides below:
Tween · posted by vaibhav bhawsar 137 days ago
Tween allows one to sow words and ideas as starting points for exploring conversations. It allows one to get a feel for what might be happening around them. Tween is a zeitgeist tool.
more documentation coming soon. For now the screenshots have notes at the bottom.
Tween was Realized during my internship at the erstwhile Yahoo! Design Innovation Group (yHaus). Thank you everyone at yHaus.
Portrait of Strokes · posted by vaibhav bhawsar 352 days ago
Portrait of Strokes
Initiative
What is a character? Is a character always anthropomorphic or can it be something else? We set out to investigate the very basic forms, such as the sound made while writing, and the most reduced form that can be to be recognized as a character. Does it have to be expressive? How can generative forms help?
Description
Portrait of strokes is a project where we attempt to make aural
multi-layered compositions using pen strokes as they are drawn on
paper. Two people sketch glyphs and in the process record the sound the marker/pen makes using a microphone. The sound made by drawing each glyph is recorded as an individual sound sample which is then layered with previously recorded glyph samples.
In our initial explorations we discovered that drawing the glyph with a certain gesture (of stroke) we could produce a variety of sounds and tones. For example drawing dots produced a staccato sound whereas drawing curves produced a much more continuous sound. By layering such characteristics sounds produced by different strokes, we were able to produce interesting progressions and rhythms (with almost jazz-like quality).
We were interested in constructing something larger through repetition of smaller discrete elements. To us, doing this illustrated the idea of building a character- a process that involves iterations in form of editing, removal and addition of elements that eventually give characteristics (make the character). The initial idea was to explore how hand drawn typographical characters/alphabets translate to unique sounds and compositions. We expanded this idea to further include abstract shapes and strokes because it gave us the freedom to explore and construct a larger gamut of sounds and glyphs.
Throughout the project we found it hard to locate the ‘character’ of/within a piece. The piece as a whole was somewhat non-deterministic compared to individual discrete sounds of strokes. We discovered that each recording/improvisation we experimented with had varying qualities. We have realized that it is now important to define a language that establishes the relationship between a stroke and a shape/glyph. Doing this will help us create a framework to help us improvise and perform.
What we consider as an interesting residue were the left over pen
drawings- glyphs/strokes. We weren’t sure what to do with sheets of paper. They did represent the process in discrete steps and served as manuscript of the composition/performance. We feel these could have been a much more important part of the performance had we used larger surface (like a whiteboard) to draw.
Feedback from Class Critique
- This was an interesting framework for further exploring gestures, drawings and sound.
- It’s interesting because our building blocks are naturaly produced sounds of a stroke vs a computationally synthesized sound.
- It will help to define more shapes, elements or drawings that reflect a certain sound quality. Instead of making the composition abstract, we could consider giving performance that actually portrays a particular sound: ie: rain, birds in a forest, autumn etc.
OLPC Updates · posted by vaibhav bhawsar 581 days ago
Enough being said about OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) am only going to provide links to interesting comments on/regarding the OLPC program headed by Nicholas Negroponte.
Shuchi Grover an Indian educator writes about OLPC and a few reasons why OLPC may have to re look the place it occupies in the Indian education milieu.
The $100 laptop
Here is one of Ethan Zukerman of GlobalVoices.org
Here you will find the OLPC News.
Fabricating Info surfaces · posted by vaibhav bhawsar 587 days ago
Some first runs of plain surfaces under the influence of fields etc using Blender. I got better results while using mesh plains vs NURB surfaces.
StrangeMap · posted by vaibhav bhawsar 589 days ago
What is it?
A photo service where you can shoot familiar people/strangers and post those photos up on a website to share with other strangers.
Who are familiar Strangers?
People who you see everyday while you take the subway or walk to school. But they are essentially strangers.
So how does it work?
You take a picture, tag it with the place you were in- the address. Send it to mobtree{att}recombine…net
The picture is logged and shows up as a new familiar stranger on the community page. Now other users can add any info about the person you just shot. Does this scare you?
See more about it in these images-
See this pdf for higher resolution wireframes and flow (WIP)-
wireframesprint.pdf
Site for StrangeMap
(This is work in progress)
Why are you doing this?
Cause I don’t like familiar strangers who don’t talk to me? No. Is it urban voyeurism? Or is it about eventually getting to know strangers you see everyday? Eventually you wouldn’t need this app to mark your strangers.
Will there be a day when a familiar stranger who you shot becomes your friend?
Maybe.
Comment [2]
Gorden Bell's Sousveillance · posted by vaibhav bhawsar 590 days ago
Gordon Bells’s been recording his life for about 6 long years now as part of the MyLifeBits project. The goal is to record “all of Bell’s communications with other people and machines, as well as the images he sees, the sounds he hears and the Web sites he visits.”
There is recent really long story about the project here
**If I record even 10 years of information then I will, on an average, will I spend at least three times the time to go through it??!! I know there are filters, “i like” algorithms, but this is just a question for sake of being a question!
**What if such personal information can be used against the person in a legal situation? Where and how do you store such sensitive information? Even others involved in a conversation are put to risk..because what they say is recorded too.
**What is personal remains personal in any given scenario. So to what use can you put all this information to?
**How important does search or even the interface become in such a scenario?
Let your computers sleep? · posted by vaibhav bhawsar 590 days ago
You have probably heard about this but two guys are asking the world to abstain from using computers for one day on 24 March 2007. This is like some mega reboot the internet sort of thing. But after looking at what people are saying they will instead do- it frankly seems like a nice thing to do.
Comments people are leaving-
I don’t know what I will do, but I can live without technology for a day.
If you are man enough you will do it!
But then I ask myself why do I need a special day to do something like this? Why can’t I do it when I FEEL like doing it? The reason why such “We Feel Good” things put me off is that they eventually turn out to be a thing to do. Though I need to rediscover that life out in the real world is much more fun than it is online. Seriously. But I don’t need a day without computers to figure that out..I need a lifetime without them!
So far 14259 people have said they will not use their computer on 24 March 2007.
Though if the internet were to really sleep for a day it would be so much fun to see financial losses some of the BigBig companies might face.
Ref shutdownday
Comment [1]
Punk n Love Texts · posted by vaibhav bhawsar 600 days ago
Here are some results of training the Bayesian analysis on a bunch of love/mush song lyrics and another bunch of Punk lyrics.
I then ran the filter on texts like President Bush Delivers State of the Union Address, THE ORIGINAL “QUIT INDIA” RESOLUTION, Koran, a couple of manifestos (yes including the communist manifesto again!!). Some funny and some obvious and some not so obvious results follow.
The Bayesian analysis is binary? only outputs something like “this is good” and “this is bad”??
CONSIDER:
PersonA style of writing is Atype
PersonB style of writing is Btype
PersonC style of writing is Ctype
PersonD style of writing is Dtype
Now that we can say we know how each person writes(ATYPE, BTYPE, CTYPE ETC) is it possible to input a text and compute which style it is closest to?
As of now in the Spam filter exercise we know if a given text is spam or not. So its a boolean result. True or false. But with the above example we have four possible outcomes (excluding the result “this text does not match any of the four styles”). So how do we accommodate a logic to compute more than two outcomes using bayesian analysis?
MSC:
this message was not spam according to the filter!! while gmail says its spam! I say its spam! Maybe the filter needs more training set/data.
————————————————————————————————————-
Hi,
Save over 50% on your medication
http://www.ledrx .com
Remove space in the above link
The rain was still drumming heavily against the high, dark glass.
Another clap of thunder shook the windows, and the stormy ceiling
flashed, illuminating the golden plates as the remains of the first
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lilNote · posted by vaibhav bhawsar 621 days ago
There is a difference between merely supplying a production apparatus and trying to change the production apparatus.
Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer”
IF THEN PLAY - Interactive Fiction · posted by vaibhav bhawsar 621 days ago
Not having entered a IF world before, being in the world of Edifice by Lucian Smith was amusing, new and soul crushing! It was amusing because I could move, in some ways more literally using text when compared to films or other narrative driven mediums. It was new for the reason that I had to align myself with the whole syntax of moving textually. It took me some time to figure out what the commands did and often I kept bumping into Valleys, cliffs, rocks, rivers and stones!! I had no sense of direction.
I have to be honest and tell you that I couldn’t figure out the motive(s) of the game. It was a little too obscure to me. More than any other command I loved the ‘examine’. Its a command curious in nature and it helped me a lot navigating through the story/puzzle. There were the mysterious others who I PAYED ATTENTION TO but it said THE OTHERS ARE RIGHT HERE. So I haven’t yet figured who the ‘others’ are. All I know is that they are harmless! There will be more of IF. HELP!!!